The Way You Think Of Me
by Smidgie
Summary: A continuation of 'As My World Divides' and 'You Belong To Me'. Artemis and Holly are apart, and self-destructing. But that's nothing new. Dark, M.


Disclaimer: Eoin Colfer still created Artemis and Holly, even if I'm the one that screws with their heads.

* * *

_**Fiend**_

He hears her in his dreams.

The soft, low rhythm of her voice, soothing, serene, as it had once been before the nightmare castle of air they had built together. Well, that wasn't really true. He had created it; she had inhabited it. But she speaks to him from the dark mire of his dreams, the bleak labyrinths that haunt his sleeping hours. He wanders through the darkness, following only the sound of her voice, melted chocolate down the walls.

And now his nightmares are the best moments of his existence, the twisted, euphoric times when he can be reunited with her, if only for a minute in time, minutes that are not even real. He is wasting away for lack of her; his mind in decay, his body little better. He had not realised how closely their lives had intertwined, become so irrevocably linked and tangled and melded that living without her is not life.

He keeps the rags. Her rags.

Once he would have understood the reasons, psychoanalysed his actions down to the bare bloody bones of what they truly were. He knows and yet he does not. Yet the scent of her – _rough soap, raw cotton, sweat and love_ – the scent he clutches to his throat and chest and aching, bleeding, mercilessly beating heart. The heart that has been ruthlessly kick-started to life inside his chest, the electrical shocks of her absence defibrillating him inside steady, shocked wakefulness – his heart is alive, as it has not been in so long, in what feels like forever. And the scent of her is fading.

It was not the scent of the past. In the past, back Before, she had smelled of clean air and life and the earth. Now she is gone, and only the ragged, bloodstained clothes she had worn remains to keep faith with him in his solitude.

And the scent of her is fading. Soon it will be gone, and all he will inhale when he touches them is himself – _expensive soap and cologne and his wife's perfume and oh God she touched them here, she touched him here_ – he reaches for them anew, the useless heart throbbing in his chest.

He stops his ears against it, the relentless thud – _thud thud thud thud_ – of his heart taking on a rhythm – _she's gone she's gone_ – and lifts her to him, lifts up the red-white garments to his face. It is a drug, heroin and cocaine, the best hit in the world, and he waits for it to hit his veins, the forgotten life to flood through him like rot through a leaf.

Artemis holds his last remnant of Holly to his face, breathing and breathing and gasping for it, the threads tugging loose under the claws of his hands, the only sound hoarse, gasping, tearless sobs as he struggles to get her inside him.

But the scent of her is gone, and when he sinks into black oblivion that night, scrabbling through the haunts and hazards of his dreamscape, she is not there. And he no longer hears her in his dreams.

**_Memory_**

"What did he do to you?" Foaly asks late one night, when they are all so damn tired and sleep is a distant memory, like Haven.

"Who?" she asks, smile bright and false and twisting away in half a second to become a grimace. Her eyes well and her shoulders shake but she is laughing, screaming with it, screeching with mirth as the tears of the truly displaced slide down her cheeks. "Everything," she gasps out between bouts of laughter, her head in her arms, resting on the tabletop. Her friends – _are they anymore? aren't we more like companions in Armageddon? _– watch and do not speak. Their world seems to have stopped, but no one really notices. They're all too used to it happening.

"Oh," Opal says helplessly, the scar dividing her once-lovely face tautening as her lips pull down in a feeble grimace. She pats Holly's arm. "Oh, Holly." None of them know how to deal with an outward display of emotion anymore, Holly knows, not even her. Sometimes it is easier for them all to pretend that the war drummed all the feeling out of them, that the aftermath did nothing but teach them the mercilessness of man. She feels sometimes as though they are all just machines, creatures functioning with no heart and created as the broken images of themselves before.

But Opal cries herself to sleep when she thinks no one is listening, and Foaly can't sleep for more than an hour at a time. Number One sometimes cries out for Qwan in his dreams, and Mulch just doesn't talk anymore. And sometimes she remembers singing Artemis to sleep after they'd made love, and how his head was too big to fit comfortably in her lap but he'd do it anyway, and how she'd rock him through his nightmares. She remembers how he looked when he broke all ten of her fingers, and kissed the fractured knuckles. And she feels.

They all feel, she knows. They just don't admit to it.

But still she does not speak, the weight of what she could say filling up her chest and smouldering down deep in her throat, like a burning poker shoved down her throat to sear at her heart.

"Artemis raped me," she imagines herself saying, and she knows there would be no reaction. It is what they expect, from the person who destroyed their world. She doesn't know how to tell them that he's not really a person anymore, more a compilation of bitter dreams and half-felt emotions all made up in the image of a man.

"Artemis loves me," she imagines herself saying, knowing the lie of it, knowing how wretchedly she wanted – _wants_ – for so long the truth of it. But they wouldn't believe that. And if she's honest with herself, she's not sure she does either.

"I love Artemis," she imagines herself saying, feeling the words scalding up her throat like burning blood pouring out from between her lips – _remembers the time he threw her against a wall and she coughed up blood for weeks and he came to her more often than usual and she felt the stirrings of what once would have been called happiness._ She thinks if she opens her mouth the words and the blood will fall out, black and red butterflies soaring out to Artemis across the void, the divide, the world.

So Holly says nothing, suffocates under the weight of the blood filling her throat and the burning butterflies in her gut and the memory of Artemis with his pale face and blue, blue, sky-cobalt-ice-death blue eyes.

Later that night, she digs her fingernails into the scars he gave her, feeling the blood drip down her wrists and her breasts and her thighs. She tears at the wounds, and sleep comes on wings of silvery blooming-bright-_pain_, screaming at her from the cold-calm of that alien part of her that loved Artemis Fowl.

Nearby, Opal cries herself to sleep, and Holly wants to scream.

* * *

Hello, again. Thanks for reading. Well, now that I've written another fic in this 'series', for want of a better word, I need to figure out a name for it. I had one in mind, but 'screwed-up-crazy-Artemis-and-Holly-and-dead-Haven universe' is kinda too long. Any suggestions?

One more thing: a note to one of my reviewers for 'As My World Divides.' Oddity, thank you for your review, even if I couldn't understand half the words. I hope this is 'shattered' enough for you. As for reforming, haven't you ever heard of the phrase 'broken beyond repair'? And yes, it is my bloody story.


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